Hopelessly Lost, But Making Good Time #106
Hello, and welcome back to "Hopelessly Lost ..." the series about making your own comics for people who aren't afraid to get their hands messy, and people who enjoy the colorful results. This is the last of our series about putting color in your comics, and we'll pick up where we left off last time: creating color comics images at home without recourse to the now ubiquitous computer. It can be done. The Coloring Book Lower tech even than the printmaking techniques we have been discussing is simple hand coloring. This sounds outrageous — who could take the time or make the effort to color a comic, or even a comic cover, by hand? It does take time (although not as much as you might think), but it is certainly not difficult, and once you develop the skills and the work habits you need you can color a lot of covers very quickly, quickly enough to make this technique a very good option for covering a special minicomic. The primary criterion for successful hand coloring has nothing to do with artistic judgment or skill with coloring media: it's a taste for TV and video. If you like to sit in front of the big screen and watch sports or movies or reality shows, then you are a prime candidate to become a great hand colorist. Audio books and podcasts work too. If you're sitting there anyway, you might as well be coloring comics. Comics can be colored with any color media, wet or dry, though marker, watercolor, colored pencil and crayon are most commonly used. Crayon and colored pencil are easy to handle, don't run, smear, rub or bleed, and can be used on a wide variety of colored papers, since their pigments sit on the surface, covering the paper color. Although colored pencils are more flexible and sophisticated, don't automatically reject the common crayon. If you print a comics cover carefully designed for the purpose on coarse paper (maybe even cheap manila drawing paper) and color it in crayon, the "coloring book" effect can be utterly charming. It may not be the way you want every comic you make to look, but it looks great on a one shot, and it's hard to imagine a series, however grim or serious, that wouldn't benefit from such a cover as a change of pace. If you choose a wet medium like watercolors or colored inks or a solvent-based one like markers, you will have special concerns. The watercolorist will probably want to print the covers on watercolor paper or a stiff stock like bristol board, which may cause problems with a home printer. Any printer that prints on cardstock will also print on most art papers, provided they are trimmed tightly to the standard size. If your printer is uncooperative, the self-serve printer/copiers at most copy shops will run just about anything. Use watercolors or colored inks with a light touch— keeping puddling to a minimum will keep the paper as flat as possible. You may still have to press your wet media covers after they dry to flatten them completely. When working with markers (which are far and away my favorite tool for hand coloring) your primary concern has to be bleed-through. Good art markers, like Copics, Chartpaks, Prismacolors and so on, run on strong solvents and bleed like crazy through most papers. For a cover this may not be a problem; it is easy enough to design your comic with blank inside fronts (and inside backs as well, if you want color on the back) and just let the bleeding happen. There are those who say this is unprofessional looking, but I rather like the natural artifacts of hand techniques, which prove that each cover is a unique creation. And who looks that carefully at an inside cover with no images or information on it anyway? If you are hand coloring a whole comic (I hope it's a short one!), or adding special touches to the inside of a book, these special concerns become particularly important. Bleed and soak-through will mess up actual story content, and that is not acceptable. If you don't want to switch to a dry medium like colored pencil, it is time to start experimenting. Try your potential techniques on a variety of papers, including some that are much heavier than the ones you normally use. Luckily, these experiments can be done with scraps, or at most with single sheets. Don't invest in production quantities of expensive special papers until you are sure they will work with the media you choose. If no other solution presents itself, there are reduced-bleed markers available in the scrapbooking section of any craft store. I find them frankly nasty to work with: low solvent markers put down a lot of harsh pigment and lack the transparency and "flow" of art markers designed for coloring. But for a simple accent task like coloring one character's T-shirt red through the pages of a short comic, you may find they work well enough. Note that these markers sometimes do bleed slightly, particularly through thin papers — never commit to using any tool without testing. Stick to a Few Colors Hand coloring techniques, and printmaking as well, all work best with a very strictly limited palette. Stick to a very few colors, the fewer the better. Mapmaking theory tells us that four colors are enough to color anything without forcing two like colors together, and with black and white they should be enough to create an interesting image. Six colors plus black and white can create an effective illusion of full color, assuming the colors are chosen carefully. Working with limited color choices makes any form of home coloring more efficient, since you only have to choose a comparatively small number of inks or tools, and you can change them out less often. The finished work comes off as more controlled and more elegant as well. No serious cartoonist wants to scream "I have a box of 64 different markers/crayons/colored pencils and I'm not afraid to use them" at his or her audience. Well, maybe once in a while. As a special effect. Second Color The ultimate limited palette is what printers call "second color" — an illusion of full color created by adding shades of a single color to a black and white image. (The first color is, of course, the black.) This coloring method was common during most of the twentieth century, when four color printing was extremely expensive. Second color was an easy way to add color to an image cheaply. A quick look through some old magazines in the attic or the public library will yield plenty of examples of the clever use of the second color in cartoons, advertising and illustration. If you are interested in hand coloring, you may find it worth your while to gather up several sets of pencils or markers in a single color — a pink, a red and a maroon, a lavender, a mid purple and a dark purple — and try second-coloring a sample of your work. The illusion is a surprisingly easy to create and gives a distinctive crisp look to the finished product that works very well for a variety of purposes. If you use black and white toning in your work, you may find it combines very well with second color. If your printing technique permits, you may even use toning in your second color screen or layer, applying your second color as toning to create a range of light color to dark color, just as you create a range of greys with toning and black ink. But whether your goal is making a digital full color book or a mini with a very simple second color cover, if you use color as a tool to extend the emotional range of your story, rather than as pure decoration, then you are, as they say, doing it right. Next time: More stuff. Until then, get in there and make some comics.
Pam Bliss has been making comics since 1989, and the minicomic, in all its infinite variety, is her favorite form. Her cartoon short stories are set in the perfect Midwestern small town, Kekionga, Indiana, where just about anything can happen. Her new ongoing series, KEKIONGA, explores the mysteries of that most mysterious place through the eyes of an innocent young superhero. For more about all the Kekionga stories, visit www.paradisevalleycomics.com. Or, for updates on work in progress, essays on storytelling and other subjects, auto industry comments and random stuff, including a thrilling weekly adventure serial, read Sharkipede's LiveJournal No Silver Cars at http://www.livejournal.com/users/sharkipede/. © 2001 - 2007, Pam Bliss
|
|||
|
Home |
Features |
Columns |
Culture Vultures |
Report Card
Indicia | Contact | Archives © Sequential Tart, 1998 – 2021 |
|||
